Patrick Murck, chief counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation, an organization that promotes and serves as an unofficial custodian of the currency, told us that by now, any business hoping to legitimately traffic in Bitcoin has already taken legal precautions.

"I don't know any sane person that hasn't already learned this lesson," he told us by phone.

He continued:

There was time of what I like to call 'Bitcoin magical thinking' — 'I can run a sports betting site in the US'... You can't run a Ponzi scheme just because Bitcoin is the medium of exchange — that the use of Bitcoin will somehow magically make Bitcoins jurisdiction-proof. If you're operating a money transmission business, it doesn't you're not a money transmitter, you're just one that uses a new technology.

But some are interpreting the case as another sign that one of the most important features of Bitcoin — its lack of rigorous regulation — is eroding.

For Bloomberg View's Timothy Lavin, Bitcoin will end up suffering from its own legitimization:

The closer Bitcoin gets to being an accepted currency, the less useful it will be as a method of exchange. And the less useful it is as a method of exchange, the harder it is to see why it has any value at all.

Almost all the advantages Bitcoin has -- it's cheap, somewhat convenient, anonymous, free from centralized authority -- derive from the fact that governments haven't taken it very seriously. As the Texas case shows, that's changing.

Several members of BitForum, one of the largest Bitcoin discussion group, published comments like the one here which seemed to reflect that view:

Bitcoin being a currency means now the entire banking infra can enforce laws and policies on bitcoin. Welcome to fees, regulation, and loss of freedom.

Silbert dismisses the notion that increased scrutiny will dampen the currency's popularity:

I don't see any waning interest in bitcoins because of what has transpired to-date - quite to the contrary, adoption and investment in the space keep growing.

Furthermore, Bitcoin is international. The US has only 5% of the world's people and there will be many countries with more favorable regulatory attitudes towards Bitcoin. Companies can move to a more favorable regulatory climate if it got that bad in the U.S. And of course Bitcoin is decentralized and can't be shut down anyway.

It's wasn't immediately clear how Bitcoin prices responded to the Texas ruling, which was first published Monday. Prices stayed flat until Thursday, when they suddenly fell. They finished the week down nearly -3% at $103.